Topic: Raspberry Pi $25 PC - Could we run GPUs/FPGAs on this? - page 3. (Read 15002 times)

They use the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore

BCM2835  video chip

anyone knows how much minihash it does ?

And they started manufacturing the first 10k batch!

Ah well that'd definitely be enough for me to prefer a Raspberry Pi. That's just personal preference of course, but I think it's a really impressive bit of kit.

Power consumption for ULV x86 chips (sempron, atom, VIA) is much higher.  Maybe 20W to 40W depending on specific CPU, load, chipset, motherboard design, etc.

That's true. If you want x86 then that's the way to go for sure.

But also what's the wattage like running a mATX board? The wattage for the Pi is 1 watt.

It might not be a huge difference but it's an achievement nonetheless

What interests me is the easy access to the GPIO pins for high speed interfacing to FPGAs. I'm not sure you have that on an Atom. I have an Atom here but I think the only thing like that is the parallel port and generally they aren't that fast. So for the Atom you likely need to also use a USB based micro controller to talk to FPGAs (as most of the the boards so far do).

At least that's my take on it. I wouldn't bother with the Raspberry if I were just going to use it's USB port to talk to FPGAs.

The point is that cheap ATX power supply could power the FPGA AND motherboard.

While $25 is 70% more (The model B w/ ethernet is $35) the increase is trivial compared to the cost of FPGA.

Say $1/MH (likely higher).  1GH FPGA array is $1000.  5GH is $5000.  $25 "more" isn't much more when it means you gain access to the larger and better developed (at least for Bitcoin) x86 architecture.

Take a 5GH array.
$5000 FPGA
$100 PSU
$100 cables, usb hubs, various parts, possibly an enclosure
-----
$5200 + $35 Pi = $5235
$5200 + $60 mATX atom/VIA/sempron board + $10 RAM = $5270

The Pi system is 0.7% cheaper but requires all development to be on the ARM architecture.  Personally I would pay the $35 premium to gain x86 compatibility.  To each his own though.


Still the Pi is interesting.

"$25 more" is double the price.
So that's actually a lot more.

As for the ATX I'm sure plenty of people have lots of cheap PSUs laying around. I know I for one would be glad to sell all my spare PSUs off for $5 or less if it means I'm rid of the things.

Now on my "To buy" list for next year.

This looks cool, but when you can buy an Atom mini ITX motherboard for $25 more.. and need an ATX supply to run the FPGAs anyway..

-rph

Wow, this a great moment for innovation, This thing will turn into so many new and custom product,

Arduino on steroid...

Same at eetimes comments may be more relevant .
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4229945/A-slice-of-Pi---the--25-computer-on-show

www.raspberrypi.org for lots and lots of information

I just made a comment on "that other thread" about people willing to pay out of pocket for being part of running Bitcoin with no interest in the actual mining profits from it. I was thinking of the Raspberry Pi connected to one FPGA-miner and using Wifi to communicate with a pool. Preferably wall socket mounted even.

Let's keep it on topic. There are to many trolls around for this thread to get off topic.
I think the raspberry pi are supposed to ship in January's.

The Raspberry Pi is far from what BFL are proposing to produce.

Anyway, BFL are taking preorders at the moment with nothing to show for it.

No chances it is to happen

PS: What I quoted is the opposite of what BFL did.

Come on now, lets not turn this thread into the pile of shit that was the BFL threads with all the trolls in it.

That part reminded me of BFL

Well, when I first read about Rasperberry PI, before the Beta version with ethernet, I mailed Eben and got his ansewer:

Eben Upton
   
Jul 22
      
to me
Hi Rui
Thanks for your mail. The devices should be available to the general
public later in the year; I'll add you to our mailing list, and will
keep you posted as we get closer to launch.

We have some thoughts about non-Ethernet point-to-point links using
MIPI CSI-2 and DSI, but this is some way down the line.

Cheers

Eben Upton
Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 4:29 PM, Rui wrote:
> Hi
> Since Slashdot published an article about your project, I've been thinking
> about it a lot and very tempted to get my hands in some of them.
> In your site you ask what would i do with it, and my answer is I'd love to
> make a very cheap and low power cluster out of it, running Xen, perhaps.
> But then, I realized something:
> Is there any other way to make each one communicate with each other?
> As far I've understood, it has to be via an usb-ethernet adapter, right?
> How costly would it be to implement some kind of bus so we could stack them
> together and even, power them all at the same time?
> Perhaps some pins on the side that would connect in some sort of breadboard?
> How about leaving some expanding capabilities open for, let's say,
> peripherals connecting directly to this bus for robotics or other purposes?
> Bear in mind that these are just some of my thoughts about it and i think
> that leaving room for parallel processing will attract lots of people, but I
> understand it might be too difficult to implement and I even believe you
> have thought about it already.
> If you need some more thoughts or ideas about this, don't hesitate
> contacting me.
> By the way, I'd like to ask you a favor of notifying me about the release of
> this way cool computer, please.
> Perhaps I'll be able to buy a pair in December or something.
>
> With my best regards,
>
> Rui

But it evolved, so, with or without ethernet itś fairly simple to make the board communicate with each other (usb wifi, usb ethernet, etc...).
So you would stack up a bunch of them, nominate one as the master and all the rest would be running as slaves.
Then, you fire up each board's OS, run XEN and start adding them up to the master.
You would end up with a virtualized computer where you would put any OS you could (don't know yet if it would support normal x86 code that way). But even so, there could be a distributed ARM miner to take advantage of this, I gess... Or let XEN take care of distribution and load balancing, alone.

  That was my first impression. Older tv for the win.

I'm also glad they added composite video to it. Not everyone has HDMI monitors you know!

How would you go about clustering these things together anyway?